Honore de Balzac Quotes
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We are never either so wretched or so happy as we say we are.
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Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture.
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The human heart may find here and there a resting-place short of the highest height of affection, but we seldom stop in the steep, downward slope of hatred.
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The impossible is justified by the fact that it occurred.
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Old men are prone to invest the futures of young men with their own past sorrows.
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The response man has the greatest difficulty in tolerating is pity, especially when he warrants it. Hatred is a tonic, it makes one live, it inspires vengeance, but pity kills, it makes our weakness weaker.
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Power is not revealed by striking hard or often, but by striking true.
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The fashions we call English in Paris are French in London, and vice versa. Franco-British hostility vanishes when it comes to questions of words and clothing. God save the King is a tune composed by Lully for a chorus in a play by Racine.
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Unintelligent persons are like weeds that thrive in good ground; they love to be amused in proportion to the degree in which they weary themselves.
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When an intelligent man reaches the point of inviting self-explanation and offers surrendering the key to his heart, he is assuredly riding a drunken horse.
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The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
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The boor covers himself, the rich man or the fool adorns himself, and the elegant man gets dressed.
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Ideas devour the ages as men are devoured by their passions. When man is cured, human nature will cure itself perhaps.
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According to man's environment, society has made as many different types of men as there are varieties in zoology. The differences between a soldier, a workman, a statesman, a tradesman, a sailor, a poet, a pauper and a priest, are more difficult to seize, but quite considerable as the differences between a wolf, a lion, an ass, a crow, a sea-calf, a sheep, and so on.
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A great love is a credit opened in favor of a power so consuming that the moment of bankruptcy must inevitably occur.
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How did you get back?' asked Vautrin. 'I walked,' replied Eugene. 'I wouldn't like half-pleasures, myself,' observed the tempter. 'I'd want to go there in my own carriage, have my own box, and come back in comfort. All or nothing, that's my motto.' 'And a very good one,' said Madame Vauquer.
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In all lands, sailors form a race apart. They profess a congenital contempt for landlubbers. As for the tradesman, he understands nothing of sailors nor cares a fig about them. He is content to rob them if he can.
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Study lends a kind of enchantment to all our surroundings.
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Un homme n'a jamais pu e lever sa ma|"tresse jusqu'a' lui; mais une femme place toujours son amant aussi haut qu'elle. A man can never elevate his mistress to his rank, but a woman can always place her lover as high as she.
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Glory and fame mean twelve thousand francs' worth of paid articles in the newspapers and five thousand crowns' worth of dinners.
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There is no such thing as a great talent without great will power.
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The virtues we acquire, which develop slowly within us, are the invisible links that bind each one of our existences to the others - existences which the spirit alone remembers, for Matter has no memory for spiritual things.
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A society of atheists would immediately invent a religion.
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Nowhere but in France are people so strictly observant of great matters and so disdainfully indulgent about small ones.